Dear quanta, Boaz Barak is speaking on Nov 4 from 10am-1pm in room 5-234 about "*Sum of squares, quantum entanglement, and log rank".* This is part of a class but anyone is welcome to come. Here is the announcement from Boaz: ---------------------------- On Friday at MIT (5-234, 10am-1pm as usual) we will talk about a very recent (in fact yet unpublished) work of me with Pravesh Kothari and David Steurer using the sos algorithm to give a non-trivial bound for the best separable state problem in quantum information theory. Even if you don't care about quantum computing, this is a fairly natural problem of trying to find a rank one matrix in a linear subspace of matrices. The rounding algorithm is inspired by results on the log rank conjecture from communication complexity, so we will talk a bit about that as well. Due to the STOC deadline, we probably won't be able to post lecture notes for this lecture beforehand. If you want to learn a bit more about the BSS problem you can look at some of the slides/talks at this workshop http://qma2016.quics.umd.edu/ as well as these lecture notes https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.01790 though the lecture will be self contained (and will not use any ket notation :) ) _______________________________________________ qip mailing list qip(a)mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/qip